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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

The American Family Through Time - Interactive Infographic

The American Family Through Time is a neat infographic produced by Archives.com (not to be confused with Archives.gov). The infographic laid out in a board game style. Every set of U.S. census data is available on the board. Click on any of the years to pop-up some highlights from that census. For example, if you click on the year 1900 you will see pie charts of information about occupations, education, and rural v. urban living. Click on the year 1870 and you can find out how many people lived in the typical household. You can click through each year's pop-up display to see the actual census questions for that year.

Applications for Education

The American Family Through Time could be of interest to U.S. History teachers who want to pique students' interest in historical demographic research. The American Family Through Time doesn't display the same information for every census year. You could have your students create their own infographics of census data that displays the same information for each year for comparison purposes.